Zone1 People simply do not understand how evil pagan religions of the past were.

[Crepitus]

I think being buried alive is about as horrific as it gets

Think it tops burned at the stake?

 

[Votto]

Think it tops burned at the stake?

Dunno, why don't you try both and get back with us?

 

[Crepitus]

Dunno, why don't you try both and get back with us?

Ok, stand still. I got a rope and some kerosene.

 

[surada]

what about them canaanites

What about them? They continued to live alongside the Hebrews.

 

[surada]

Sure it was.

Constantine, who started the Catholic church, was not even a Christian. He still worshiped the pagan gods, even though it was rumored he converted on his death bed. This was a man who had his wife and son murdered, and all for political ambition.

He then created the Vatican which was a literal sovereign nation with a literal army and with a Pope that acted as emperor to all the kings in Europe. You then had all that follows, which is the politics of man for power over his fellow men. The evils of Inquisitions, Jewish ghettos and Crusades were just around the corner.

Conversely, Jesus said that his kingdom was not of this world, nor could be. In fact, when he gave the people food to eat with the miracle of the loaves of bread and fish, they tried to make him an earthly king, and he fled from them.

The OT also hammers this point home in 1 chapter 8 Samuel as the Hebrews demanded a human king. God warned them of the abuses if they continued to insist on one, but they would not listen. The next thing you know they were in the ovens of Nazi Germany.

Try again.

Don't confuse Emperor Constantine with Pope Constantine. They were hundreds of years apart.

The Catholic Church emerged in the fourth century after Emperor Constantine came to its rescue after 300 years of persecution.

Pope Constantine was 7th century.

 

[surada]

That was the Catholic church.

No one did that before or after their little love affair with world politics, and no where in scritpure was the condoned.

There's a verse about not suffering a witch to live.

 

[Foxfyre]

Neolithic women in Europe were tied up and buried alive in ritual sacrifices, study suggests

The research found evidence of the "incaprettamento" method of murder at 14 Neolithic sites in Europe.

www.yahoo.com

The murder of sacrificial victims by "incaprettamento" — tying their neck to their legs bent behind their back, so that they effectively strangled themselves — seems to have been a tradition across much of Neolithic Europe, with a new study identifying more than a dozen such murders over more than 2,000 years.

The study comes after a reassessment of an ancient tomb that was discovered more than 20 years ago at Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux near Avignon, in southern France. The tomb mimics a silo, or pit where grain was stored, and it held the remains of three women who were buried there about 5,500 years ago.

The new study, published Wednesday (April 10) in the journal Science Advances, reinterprets the positions of two of the skeletons and suggests the individuals were deliberately killed — first by tying them up in the manner called "incaprettamento" and then by burying them while they were still alive, perhaps for an agricultural ritual.

The God of the Bible, in comparison, did not allow human sacrifice. Although he told Abraham to sacrifice his son, he stopped him, as if to say, I am not like the other pagan gods. This is not acceptable.

Considering our modern standards of morality, humane treatment of people and humans, justice and injustice, those unschooled in history don't realize how brutal and evil pretty much all the world was in past eras. No surprise that was not reflected in their religions as well.

Certainly Judaism is the first ancient religion we know of that had a code of ethics more closely approximating what we understand as morality now. And from that evolved Christianity, now the largest religion in the world, that has significantly changed most of the world from savage to more just and humane even among those who are not Christian.

One other exception to the usual savagery found in the world was Zorastrianism, an ancient Persian religion that, along with Judaism, came closer to Christian values and principles than any others. King Cyrus of Persia, 6th Century BC, was an advocate of that religion that was tolerant of all religions, and according to many Old Testament texts, was instrumental in helping and protecting the Jews of his era and was praised in the Scriptures as 'anointed by God'.

And other exception later in the 4th Century BC was Alexander the Great who did embrace Greek paganism but an enlightened (Hellenistic) form of paganism so that his reign was also beneficial to the Jews. Hellenism so permeated the near East because of Alexander's reign and effectively changed much of the cultural perspectives and introduced Greek language to the near east. Which is why except for a few Aramaic words, the New Testament of the Bible was written in ancient Greek. (And almost certainly the Hellenistic influence was instrumental in the ability of devout Jews to follow Jesus.)

 

[Zebra]

interesting thread!